Not impressive with my new storage.... solutions?

[iameatingjam]

TLC SATA will be close to maxing SATA on one drive even with pSLC exhausted. Those drives you got have to be QLC, the performance level matches it (and it seems they also have low rated endurance as well).

Personally I think SATA still has usefulness, mostly down to how power inefficient and how hot NVME drives get but also how much more readily SATA ports are available.

You havent said much about your workload so cant say a TLC SATA would be enough to satisfy you, but I assume it would as you said you was happy with the older smaller MX500s.

Samsung 870 EVO 4 TB Review

The Samsung 870 EVO SSD has been on the market for a while and is still the fastest SATA solid-state-drive offered by Samsung. Right now it is available used for $150 for the reviewed 4 TB model, which makes this an interesting way to upgrade your storage, especially if you're out of M.2 slots.

www.techpowerup.com

Thanks for finding that for me, I appreciate it, but I'm a little spooked off buying sata for now. Now just need a decent price 4TB m.2 here in Canada. I keep seeing this brand pop up absolutely everywhere:

KingSpec XG 7000 4TB M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0x4 NVME 1.4 Speed up to 7400MB/s Write Speed Up to 6600MB/s Internal Solid State Drive for PS5 PC Desktop Laptop Game-Player with Heatsink - Newegg.com

Buy KingSpec XG 7000 4TB M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0x4 NVME 1.4 Speed up to 7400MB/s Write Speed Up to 6600MB/s Internal Solid State Drive for PS5 PC Desktop Laptop Game-Player with Heatsink with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.ca

It seems kinda sketchy and I can't find out much about it, but I like the price. It doesn't have dram though and that does make me a little hesitant. I'll have to look some more into it.

You're likely running into a bottleneck with the command queue interface before the (super low) bandwidth of SATA even becomes a problem. You see, the cheapest 128 GB dogshit-tier NVMes with no DRAM and a single QLC die in them are gonna do 1800 MB/s+ and they rarely suffer from speed issues due to HMB and an efficient queuing system.

I see. Thats not really relevant in this scenario though is it? Two sata drives are never going to get anywhere close to 1800MB/s. And in my experience, the benefit of going from 600MB to 1200MB is very real and tangible. Anyway at this point I am really sick of talking about sata drives

Oh hey though, you're a memory guy. Another user suggested upgrading ram to use in primocache but I'm not so sure. And if I were to do that ( which I probably wont) would it be in my better interest to go for a dual rank 64GB kit or a single rank kit that tops out at what, 48GB, or something like that?

 

[chrcoluk]

Considered that current generation SSDs can exceed the SATA bus's entire raw bandwidth tenfold and then some, before even accounting for the NVMe improvements over AHCI, I don't think this should even be a concern, basically, SATA's not suitable for a heavy storage workload anymore. SATA drives all tend to use slow NAND, and have no access to HMB to make up for their insufficient or complete lack of a DRAM cache. Controllers are almost universally out of date because the bus is so old, anything that performs like a 14 year old controller like the SF-2281 is more than capable enough for a SATA 6Gbps bus.

Dont disagree, development for SATA drives I expect is almost dead at this point, which means like you said old controllers doing the job, but also as you said they are still adequate for the SATA interface. I am convinced those drives he has must be using QLC or some other trash NAND, as TLC has advanced well past the point of SATA bandwidth now.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Dont disagree, development for SATA drives I expect is almost dead at this point, which means like you said old controllers doing the job, but also as you said they are still adequate for the SATA interface. I am convinced those drives he has must be using QLC or some other trash NAND, as TLC has advanced well past the point of SATA bandwidth now.

For sure if its something that requires NVME levels of performance, heavily threaded then yeah use NVME, but it sounds like his main use case is copying media files to the drives and then using them to stream media.

Low performance NAND is really bad on SATA because of the lack of HMB, really. Data has to go somewhere and eventually you're going to be effectively writing directly to flash and that's when performance craters. It'll happen even on MLC to some extent.

Oh hey though, you're a memory guy. Another user suggested upgrading ram to use in primocache but I'm not so sure. And if I were to do that ( which I probably wont) would it be in my better interest to go for a dual rank 64GB kit or a single rank kit that tops out at what, 48GB, or something like that?

I would not bother with caching software on an SSD. It's not the type of thing that benefits this medium, the biggest speedup that caching software offers to HDD users is the problem that SSDs solve by nature, that is, no moving parts and thus no seek time. It's not worth it.

That KingSpec drive is common here, it's a Chinese brand popular on AliExpress. Can't vouch for the quality, although they are real? Sucks man, but you probably will have to spend some cash on getting a high-capacity drive that meets your speed requirements. Check the TPU SSD review section, W1zz has reviewed some bangers from less known brands lately that you may find for cheap. Good luck

 

[R0H1T]

Low performance NAND is really bad on SATA because of the lack of HMB, really.

Well windows still caches the data, even for SATA SSD's IIRC.

 

[chrcoluk]

I looked into the model, spec page here.

https://www.kingspec.com/news/kingspec-releases-the-latest-gaming-storage-solution-nvme-pcie-ssd-xg7000.html

It isnt QLC which is good, but the brand is one you taking a chance on.

--edit--

That first link is an older one up to 2tb, there is a new spec page and video here, that covers 4tb, but now they just call it vaguely 3d nand, however the rated endurance scales up from the older TLC models.

https://www.kingspec.com/product/m2-nvme-pcie-gen4-ssd-xg7000-2280mm.html

The drive will slow down if you write too much in one go, all modern SSDs are designed with a fast pSLC cache area, and for most common use cases that will cover all writes to the drive, but in some cases like yours where you doing very long sustained writes, you might exceed this cache. QLC I would expect to be around 50-200MB/sec range when pSLC is exhausted, and TLC depending on quality anywhere from high 100s up to multi GB/sec.

 

[iameatingjam]

Well I... didn't venture far off into uncharted waters... went with something I'm familiar with, the sn850x. It was still more expensive than those new kids on the block, and who knows what their goal is ( Russian intelligence perhaps.... okay maybe not but still with geopolitics how it is... Puts everybody on edge.)

Well anyway, so I paid an extra $100 for some ram and a little bit of peace of mind.

But still, other brands like Samsung, sk hynix and the (kingstom?) kc3000 still blow the sn850x out of the water when it comes to price.

I was also considering The Netac nv7000 which I love, btw, but the thing is 1) its just not as cheap anymore ( I suspect its because they've pivoted to the dramless model) and 2) Netac really likes to mix and match parts. So while my unit was outstanding, there's no guarantee that the next new one will be too. Might have considered the p5 plus but they are becoming harder and harder to find ( discontinued I think) and the replacement is way too expensive.

Still, the 4tb drive and the adapter set me back nearly 500 Canadabucks. I'm sure I can make either some or all of that back dependign on how many of these old ssds lying around I should sell


@chrcoluk @R0H1T @Dr. Dro

Anyway, for everybody who gave input, thank you very much!

Well windows still caches the data, even for SATA SSD's IIRC.

You're right. I know this very well because I used to work at a software company that serviced the healthcare industry. The software we sold was pretty archaic, I'm surprised anybody even paid for it ( and you should have seen some of the invoices, holy crap, some places paying 5 figures a year just for this barely functional peace of crap being held together with duct tape and glue. The language its written in is escaping me, but I know its quite old, at least 25 years old but possibly older. Also maybe it starts with D? Oh I just remembered, its Delphi.

Well anyway. When we'd get a new client we'd have to get one of their workstations set up as the clinic's server. Honestly any off the shelf walmart pc would have done the job. We had system requirements, but everytime I would tell them, there's only one that really mattered, write caching.... (yes the thing that should be on by default on just about every hard drive ever, yes.) So I'd say something along the following to the manager/receptionist/whoeever "You go tell your tech guy to forget his all his usual bullshit and just make sure the PC has direct access to the hard drive. Its more important than any other aspect of the computer, and if it doesn't have write caching, it wont work"

But they couldn't even do that. The guys in the IT departments love to overcharge their clients for servers. Building them $10,000-$20,000 machines just totally overkill for what was needed, and yet because of the NAS/RAID/whatever system they had running on it, write caching wouldn't work because the OS didn't have direct enough access to the drive.

A $10,000 computer, completely useless. Could have used your grandmas laptop but nope had to go spend $20,000 on a really pretty door stopper. Yeah that frustrated me to no end. Not even sure why I shared that. Well... now you know! lol.